Chapter Eleven #2
“And when he didn’t see it?”
I don’t answer because the answer is that when he didn’t see it, he might have assumed I was with someone, which is why he drove away instead of coming in, which means I was fine, which means tonight was a near miss we survived and nothing more.
Except my hands are still trembling.
Reece reaches over and puts his hand over mine.
No comment on the trembling. No speech. He waits.
“My father…” I say finally, “… has spent thirty years watching players make bad decisions. He has seen careers end because of distractions, real distractions, the kind where someone loses focus and makes choices they can’t come back from.
He’s watched contracts fall apart, seasons collapse, and promising athletes walk away from the game because their personal lives ate them alive. ”
“I know.”
“He raised me inside all of that. He made sure I understood it.” I turn my hand over under his. “He’s not wrong about it, Reece. He’s seen it happen too many times to be wrong.”
“And you think that’s us.”
“I think that’s what he would see if he came through that door.” I look at the studio, my station, my machine, my design on his ribs. “His star pitcher, shirtless. In his daughter’s studio after hours.”
Reece is quiet for a moment. “That’s not what it is.”
“You know what it is. I know what it is.” I meet his eyes. “He would see the headline version.”
The headline version. I’ve been avoiding thinking about it in those terms because it means admitting how exposed this is, how visible, and how many ways it could go wrong from angles we’re not even watching.
Lena is already circling. The media has already noticed Reece’s name in connection with the studio once.
My father drives by on a Tuesday night and sits outside for two minutes.
We are not as hidden as I’ve been pretending.
“If he found out…” I say, “… and went to management—”
“He wouldn’t.”
“He might if he thought it was affecting your game.” I look at him steadily. “Would it be? Honestly.”
Something moves across his face. “My numbers are the best they’ve been in three years.”
“Right now. In the good part.” I pull back my hand and wrap both arms around myself. “What happens in the bad part? When we fight, or something goes wrong, or the press gets hold of it and makes it something neither of us recognizes? What happens to your focus then?”
“I’d handle it.”
“Everyone says they’ll handle it. My father has watched fifty athletes say they’ll handle it.”
“I’m not fifty athletes.”
“No.” I look at him, and the thing I feel when I look at him is exactly the problem. It’s too big, too certain, and arrived too fast without my permission. “You’re the one I actually care about, which makes it worse.”
He’s quiet for a moment. I let the words sit there because I said them out loud, there’s no taking them back, and maybe there shouldn’t be.
“Then let me be worth caring about,” he says.
“You already are. That’s not the question.
” I stand up, needing to move, needing to do something with my hands.
I go to the window and stand to the side, checking the street the way I used to check for thunderstorms as a kid, half hoping, half dreading.
The street is empty. “The question is whether I can keep doing this and pretending I don’t see what’s coming. ”
“What do you think is coming?”
“I think my father is not stupid. I think Lena is not done. I think this city is smaller than it looks, and two people trying to be invisible are twice as visible as one.” I turn around.
“I think the second he finds out, and he will find out, the fallout lands on you, not on me. Your contract. Your relationship with your coach. Your reputation, which matters more than you let on, no matter how many times you say you don’t care about the press. ”
Reece stands up. The movement is slow and deliberate, the way he moves when he’s decided something.
“You’re not wrong about any of it,” he says.
“I know.”
“And I’m still not walking away.”
“I’m not asking you to walk away.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “I’m asking you to understand what we’re carrying. Both of us. So when it gets heavier, and it will get heavier, neither of us acts surprised.”
He crosses the studio and stops in front of me. He’s close enough I can see the tattoo at the edge of his shirt, the bird’s wing in the strip of skin between the fabric and his ribs. My work. My lines. Permanent, which was the whole point.
“I understand what we’re carrying,” he says.
“I understood it the second I walked back into this studio after your father told me to stay away.” He tilts my chin up, and I let him because I am apparently constitutionally incapable of holding my ground when he does the quiet, certain version of himself.
“What I want to know is whether you do.”
“I’m the one who brought it up.”
“You brought up the risks. The fallout. The press, my contract, my coach.” His thumb traces my jaw. “I want to know if you understand what you’re carrying and what this means to you. Not the version you’d give your father, Zoe, or anyone else. The real one.”
The real one.
The real one is his heartbeat under my palm an hour ago, the way I know his coffee order, the truck engine outside, the two minutes of held breath, and my hands still not entirely steady.
The real one is eleven discarded sketches, a twelfth one drawn at two in the morning, and the feeling when I pressed the stencil to his ribs and saw it sit right, saw it belong there.
It’s the same feeling I get when a design clicks, and I know it won’t need changing.
The real one is terrifying.
“I understand it,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yes.” I step back because I need the space to finish the thought without his hands on my face. “Which is exactly why tonight scared me. Not because I don’t want this, but because I do. Enough to understand what it costs.”
He watches me for a moment. Reads me the way he reads everything, patiently, without rushing to an answer.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay?”
“Okay. We’re careful. We’re smarter.” He sits back down on the chair, positions himself back on his side, arm up. The professional returns to the thing we were doing before the truck pulled up outside, before the held breath, before all of it. “Finish the session.”
I stand there looking at him, shirtless, calm, the tattoo half-shaded on his ribs, his eyes forward, already steadying himself for the needle.
Something in my chest pulls tight and then releases.
I sit down, pull on my gloves, and pick up the machine.
“Two more sessions after this,” I say.
“I know.”
“You’ll need to be more careful getting here. Park farther away.”
“Already planned it.”
“And the window…”
“Blinds,” he says. “I’ll buy you blinds.”
“I don’t want blinds.”
“Then I’ll put them up, and you can take them down when I leave.”
I turn the machine on. “Breathe,” I say.
He does.
I put my hand against his side, steady myself, and go back to work.
Outside, the street stays quiet. The city goes about its business around us, indifferent and enormous.
In here, the machine hums, the lines go down clean and exact, and neither of us says what we both know—my father will drive by again, Lena is already watching, and the space we’ve carved out for this is smaller than we’ve been pretending.
But the bird is gaining depth beneath my hands, the feathers reading real now, the hidden diamond precise in its place.
And when I finally set the machine down for the night, Reece looks at the mirror for a long time without saying anything, and the expression on his face is worth every last one of the complications waiting on the other side of that studio door.
I just don’t know it yet.